It is not too surprising that Ubuntu came in first in DesktopLinux.com's 2007 Desktop Linux Market Survey, or that Firefox was the topmost browser by far. More interesting is that for the first time ever in the site's annual surveys, GNOME surpassed KDE among desktop environments (45% over 35%), with Xfce a solid third (8%).

I'm not sure if GNOME suffers from NIH. GNOME has lots of external dependencies (Mozilla code in Epiphany for example).
KDE OTOH has very few external dependencies and the KDE guys are proud of that (IIRC besides Qt only some XML parser, and some compression libs).